The Gartner market research firm attests that the server market in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) has shrunk by 9.2% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same quarter the previous year.

Hewlett-Packard maintained the top position in the server market. The numbers from Gartner show that 705,000 servers were sold in EMEA in the fourth quarter 2008. The resulting revenue of $4.3 million is about 20% lower than the fourth quarter 2007 figure. Gartner had to go back to the second quarter of 2002 to find a drop in units sold. At that time the burst of the dot.com bubble resulted in a 11% reduction.

Server market share in units, 4th quarter 2008.

Errol Rasit, lead analyst at Garner, speaks of equally paltry results for the third quarter 2008. With the second revenue loss following the next quarter, results show how vulnerable the server market is. Not just Europe, but the other two regions in EMEA were affected.

Almost all top server vendors took losses. Only Sun showed increases in their x86 servers, which Gartner attributes to Sun's migration options. However, Sun's x86 servers have no more than a 2% market share.

The biggest losses involved vendors of RISC and Itanium servers, down 24.8%. Gartner also points to a weaker market of high-end UNIX servers.

According to a current Gartner study, Windows Mobile has lost 28% of the mobile market share over the last year. Winners at first are Apple and Blackberry, but open source systems are gaining over the long run.

International Data Corporation (IDC) has analyzed PC sales figures for EMEA in the third quarter of 2008 and discovered that netbooks are responsible for more than half the nearly 30% sales growth. Linux is to ride along on the wave, which is to remain at its current level.